


Scrap the whole thing

by Jacobi



Category: Captain America, Marvel, Stucky - Fandom
Genre: Artist!Steve, Bucky writes, Catholic!Steve Rogers, Confessions, Jewish!Bucky Barnes, M/M, PostWar, Starting Over, prewar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24827086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacobi/pseuds/Jacobi
Summary: “Till the end of the line, pal. You're shit at math, so let me refresh your memory: lines don't fuckin end. But that's not really the meaning, and you're shit at metaphors, too, so I'll just tell you: you're my line. You're where I draw the line. You're where I end and I begin. So I'm with you so long as I end with you, and if I'm not your line and you end with somebody else, so be it.”Bucky has a lot of journal entries, and in between: life, starting over
Relationships: Bucky & Sam, James "Bucky" Barnes & Gabe Jones, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, James “Bucky” Barnes & Tony Stark, Steve Rogers & Tony Stark
Comments: 2
Kudos: 38





	Scrap the whole thing

_Well, I don't know what they expected, putting you in this army and all. Certainly not obedience, I hope.Anyway, they must have known that when I'm up in the trees and it's down to you or five other people, it'll always be you. I'll always look out for you, first. That's how it goes. You, then whichever howlie is in the most danger, then me -cause I gotta keep you alive- then the rest of 'em. So_ _no shit, I took out the scientist. I know what a man looks like when he's poised to kill, and sweetheart, he was gonna kill you._

This is what Bucky wrote when he got stuck on extra duty for taking out a "key informant" that he was instructed to keep alive.

"You're sweet on 'im." Dum-Dum hung around and chain smokes cigars, pretending to be doing something else just close enough to provide a welcome break from Bucky's isolation.

"Who, Hitler? You got me." Bucky accepted the proffered cigarette. Dum-Dum only smoked cigars, so he saved his cigarette rations for Bucky. It was a nice gesture.

Dum-Dum laughed, and then looked like he was surprised that he laughed. "No, I- Christ, that shouldn't even be funny, aren't you Jewish or something?"

Bucky thought back to nights spent fighting with Becca over who got to light the menorah and sitting through the occasional Catholic mass and being confused as hell next to Steve- but Christian Christmas with the Rogers' was a hell of a good time. And besides, it was Santa who gave the gifts anyway, so little boy Bucky decided that God didn't mind.

Older Bucky watching the smoke curl in the rainy air in a foreign country figured that at this point, God probably had denounced him fifty times over and wouldn't care about all of those Christian Christmases with Steve when it came down to it.

"Yeah," Bucky replied after a beat. "Or something."

"You got it on your tags?" Dum-Dum asked hesitantly. Bucky glanced over and grinned a wolfish grin. If he'd known being raised a dirt poor Jew alongside a scrappy Irish Catholic knocked Dougan this far sideways, he'd have brought it up months ago himself.

"Sure as hell do."

"You know, your name- it's just that if you didn't have it on your tags, nobody would know. Because it's not a very Jewish name." Dum-Dum stumbled around the statement.

"Sure it ain't, but it's an American one." Bucky left his answer as it was and elaborated no further.

"And Steve's Catholic?" Dum-Dum continued on the topic anyway.

"Irish-Catholic. You taking a poll? I bet Carter's Protestant or whatever they have in England- is it the Church of England? Do they worship England?" Bucky was enjoying himself, he really was. He liked being difficult.

"You're so damn difficult to get a point across with, huh? Listen, I'm asking because I'm trying to figure out how you, big and all and Jewish, got sweet on a little Catholic Mick- hey, don't get fussy, I can say it 'cause I'm a Mick myself."

Bucky wrestled Dougan under his arm, knocking his bowler hat askew. "Funny thing about religion, you Mick- hey, you know I'm Irish too, Judaism is a matrimonial religion, pal- is that when you're as hopeless as me an' Steve, it just don't matter all that much 'cause God doesn't goddamn care." He laughed.

"You're sweet on Steve." Dum-Dum returned to his original accusation.

"If I was sweet on Steve," Bucky replied with a sudden seriousness. "I'd have already shot 'im in the head to save him the misery."

The silence that swallowed them came immediately and wrong, like a movie frozen in frame. "I don't like that answer." Dum-Dum said belatedly. "I don't like the way you talk. It's too real."

"War is real, pal." Bucky pulled his mouth into as close of an apologetic smile as he could manage. "And I'll tell ya one thing," He dragged Dum-Dum close to his body, pulling his ear to Bucky's lips. 

It was vulgar joke that was whispered, and just the right kind of black humor to get the world unfrozen again.

"I fuckin' hate you, you're goddamned crazy." Dum-Dum shook his head, a smile playing under his mustache as he wandered off into the growing dusk to find somebody else to bother.

_They're saying I shot him 'cause I love you. But darling, that's where they get this all wrong. I didn't come to war because I love you. That's the stupidest shit I've ever heard, ain't nobody on this earth that's that nobel, no matter what those shmucks feed the guys down at the recruiting station_.

"You a queer?"

They were smoking on a rare day of leave in a field, sitting on hay bails in the afternoon sun and feeling reckless as hell.

Bucky turned to Gabe. "Hey, it's don't ask don't tell, ain't it?"

Gabe shrugged. "I'm asking, ain't I?"

"Well here's your answer- it's my fucking business." Bucky frowned, wondering why suddenly everybody seemed to be invested in who he was. "Dum-Dum put you up to this?"

"Hell no. Just asking 'cause war's a bitch and you gotta know we'd be in your corner." Gabe didn't take the baited argument, choosing to take the high road as always.

"I don't believe that."

"Well, Barnes," Gabe stood up and clapped him on the shoulder. "Maybe it's time you aughtta start putting a little more faith in us, huh? We already got a mick, a black, a chink, an expatriate, and a Jew. Might as well just set the lot of us on fire so we get well and used to hell's flames."

It was long after Gabe left Bucky sitting in the field smoking aimlessly that Bucky muttered: "Ain't that the god's honest truth."

_I know you like I know how Brooklyn sounds at night. You don't ever have to hide things from me. Well, really, you can't, so don't bother, but I mean it. Tell me anything, everything. I wanna hear it. I wanna hear it like some sorta wife._ _Tell me about your day. Smile at me. Look, I'll even make you these nice rations and shine your boots. Did the men tease you about how you blush? I'll pretend I wasn't laughing, too. I'll listen to the story twice-over, and I'll love you twice as much._  
  


How many times did it take to electrocute one stubborn memory of an American icon from the soldier's head? Exactly one. It was not a very deep-rooted memory nor one that the soldier was particularly committed to. The trouble was with that Steve Rogers character. There were too many memories of him mixed in with the soldier's identity, so they decided to scrap the whole thing and start over.

That presented another problem. Starting over seemed to be part of the soldier like Steve Rogers was- so many jobs and scattered pieces of education and vocations and trying and failing and trying again. The one thing with the most false starts in James Barnes's life was Steve Rogers. He loved him once, twice, stop it now and settle down, but here he was, loving him again, again, again, forever. So, scrap the whole thing and start over.

Two men face each other on a bridge. One is trying to stab the other. The other is slow on the uptake because he's busy remembering what Howard Stark said a literal lifetime ago: HYDRA isn't going to attack you with a pocket knife. He wants to ask suddenly, inappropriately, if it is a pocket knife. Instead, the mask comes off and out of his mouth comes the penultimate question: "Bucky?"

Scrap the whole thing and start over.

_You can't swim. Neither can I. When did we learn?_

The Asset jumped without thinking. Actually, he had two thoughts. Three thoughts. Four thoughts. They came as he jumped, tumbling over one another like too-eager puppies. Number one: Wait, what did you say about lines? Number two: hold on, pal, you can't swim! Number three: wait a sec, I can't swim! Number four: oh. I guess I can.

It's way, way, before and some old memory of a smaller boy is talking to an equally old memory of a bigger boy that feels a little more familiar in that the Asset thinks he could step inside his rib cage and know his way around. The smaller boy is gasping for air. The bigger boy waits until he breaths again. He says, don't go anywhere, I'm comin right back, and leaves the smaller boy basically laid out on the street for some penny candy down the block. Also, so the smaller boy doesn't see how his hands are shaking from the fear of losing him.

The Asset looks down at the man, gasping for air. The poetic irony turns his guts to lead. What if I knew you so well my soul remembered, he thinks, but I'll never be that person to you again? He wants to say 'don't go anywhere, I'm comin right back', but he can't remember what language this man speaks. In fact, he can't even remember what country he's in. Time and reality are slippery things when your brain's been frozen soup for so long. The Asset remembers feelings better than moments in time. He remembers feeling worry, and the sadness that makes his hands curl to fists is something he wishes he didn't recognize.

The Asset leaves. He comes back without candy, just to see the imprint of where the man was, and the scuff marks around his outline to show that he dragged himself up and away.

_Okay, so I went to the museum. You and me. I'm saying something, you're laughing, which feels familiar. Your name is Steve Rogers. I remember the feeling of you. Like going into the coat closet and running my face all through my mother's fur coats. Warm and silly and forbidden. How come they don't have_ _anything about my mother and the coat closet? How come I have two different birth dates? I think I'm going to leave and go to Romania. I think I liked it there._

Steve runs his fingers over the words of this entry in particular. Bucky is under the surveillance of Sam who, despite or maybe because of his best efforts, is getting a few laughs out of him. Bucky wrote all the time before the war and during it. He left his journals to Becca, and everything else to Steve. Becca left the journals to Steve. Steve never opened them. This journal's first entry is a week after Bucky pulled Steve from the river. Steve runs his fingers over 'my mother's fur coats'.

"You wanna know about your Ma?" Steve runs his tongue against the backs of his teeth and steels himself for a hostile reply. Sam watches both of them and then carefully leaves.

"He reminds me of Gabe." Bucky says slowly.

"Because he's black?" Steve quirks and eyebrow and gets a funny look from Bucky in return.

"No. 'Cause he asks questions he already knows the answer to. Asshole."

"Yeah," Steve sits on an overturned crate and tries not to look at Bucky's arm. "Listen, you wanna know about your Ma?"

"You're always lookin for a fight, tell me about Becca instead."

Blue eyes against blue eyes, unblinking. One set has grey undertones, the other has green.

"Your Ma," Steve begins.

"Was married to a Romanian crime lord who fled to America in the early 1900s. She had a lot of mink fur coats. I was six when business went under. Young enough to adapt to poverty, old enough to remember the coats." Bucky fills it in almost carelessly, like it bores him.

Steve looks at Bucky's metal arm. At his hands and his fingers. He never wrote in a journal, but he sure drew a lot of love letters to those knuckles. "I have a confession," He begins again. The two of them are always beginning again.

"I ain't a priest, god, or saint."

Bucky says things, Steve laughs, it feels right.

_I ain't a priest, god, saint, or even close to Catholic. I could not tell you one single prayer you were always saying in that dead language they tried to cram down our throats in public school before I weaseled my way into Spanish. Didn't really learn anything more in that class, except that it renewed my desire to_ _travel. Isn't that crazy? Immigrant, dirt poor kid in Brooklyn with questionable parents wants to go to Mexico someday. I was a lunatic then and I'm still one now, I guess, because I have half a mind to pray to you. I mean it. You just look like everything terrible. I mean, like one of my ideas, you know? The ones that were illegal and half baked and so bad they turned out good. That's what you look like, or maybe that's what I wish. That me loving you would turn out good._ _That's what I would pray to you for: me loving you, and no more restarts. But, here you are pulling a funny face at me and I've lost my nerve for the next four million years._

Sam chews on a toothpick. He offers one to Bucky, who takes it and turns it over in his fingers like he's never seen one before. "Alright, now tell me the truth," Bucky braces himself for the queer question. "Isn't Natasha fuckin terrifying?"

A pleasant surprise: a question Bucky actually knows the answer to. "Nah," He shakes his head. "Just a strong woman."

"Exactly, man. That's the point, she's a ruin your whole fuckin life kinda woman."

"Not my life, so I ain't worried." As soon as he says it, Bucky sees the easy way Steve and Natasha interact just out of earshot and rethinks his assessment.

"Not your type, womanizer?"

"Not exactly. Don't believe everything you read." Bucky sticks the toothpick in his mouth. It's mint flavored. This century has so many strange things, himself included.

"Man, I was literally taught about you from a textbook, not some Wikipedia site."

Bucky doesn't know what Wikipedia is, and he doesn't want to encourage Sam. "So? I'm telling you, don't believe everything you read about me." He's suddenly irritated and he doesn't know why. The idea of being boiled down to a textbook that can't even get his birthday correct is so bad that it should be funny. Except it isn't. Don't tell me who I am, Bucky wants to shout. I'm the one that gets to do that, not you. Sam holds up his hands.

"Whatever, dude. I'm just sayin. It's not like you really go out of your way to tell me anything yourself."

Bucky wishes they would both leave it at that, but he knows they won't. He and Sam are similar like he and Gabe were similar. Difficult. "It's don't ask, don't tell, ain't it?" He means that Sam has never exactly asked who he is, but it comes off with too many meanings, the implications still clinging to it from a time of hay bales and hellfire.

Sam's face does something strange. It dissolves. It smiles upside down. "No, man. No, it ain't. Not anymore."

_Do not fucking tell me who I am, Sam. I know who I am even if I don't remember my own name half the time. I've always known who I am in relation to Steve. Here I am, back at his six, so do not tell me who the hell I am. Don't look at me like I'm confused- I am not confused. But ask Steve who he is. Better yet, you'll know a man more by asking who he loves. Go ahead, ask him. He will say, I love this country. He will not say, I love Bucky. I didn't go to war because of love, I went because I got drafted. I didn't shoot a scientist because I loved Stev_ e, _or else I would have shot Steve to keep him away from all of it. Here is the answer to that question you don't know how to ask, Sam. I'll tell it to you now: I_ _need Steve. I need him. I have to have him. I don't always love him. Sometimes I hate him. Or, I could hate him. But I do need him. I need him to be safe and I need him to keep smiling and I need him to be alright. I already told you, I know who I am when it comes to Steve and it's_ _this: a needer._

Steve said it so casually. He even added a little carefree laugh toward the end. He had the tone of a man who had given in. Accepted. Shrugged and lived with it: "I'd kiss Nat, kill....hm. No, kill nobody. Marry Bucky."

"Marry Bucky?" Tony cast his eyes around his lab desperately for somebody else to share in the moment. It was just him and Steve. Tony couldn't believe this, he really couldn't. Where the hell was Sam when you needed him? Or Natasha? Not even Pepper was in the lab.

"Sure, I mean, I've loved him since forever. Plus, it's legal now."

"It's legal now." Tony seemed only capable of repeating the last parts of Steve's sentences. He cleared his throat. "What about Peggy?"

"I loved her too." A smile quirked at Steve's mouth. It was not a Captain America smile. It didn't bully you into smiling back. It was softer, more like a suggestion. "Natasha says my type is people that'll stand on their own for so long it'll kill me. Guess I'll die."

"Hm," Tony found it within himself to laugh. "You and me both, Capsicle."

_Who on earth thought it would be a good idea to let somebody like Howard Stark be in charge of raising a child, and why on earth do I hate him so much that I almost couldn't live without him? How on earth is he so much like you?_

"So," Tony used his screw driver to gesture abstractly between Bucky and some other entity. Bucky hoped it wasn't the robot that kept chirping and obsessively rolling itself into the wall. "You and ol' Apple Pie, how long's that been going on?"

"What?"

"All American. America's Sweetheart. Blond Barbie. You know, Mr. Righteous."

Bucky only stared. Tony snapped a plate into place. "Alright, Buckaroo, I untangled some of the wiring. Looks like a repair was made by those HYDRA thugs, but it wasn't a very good one, so I fixed it. Thank me later. Actually, thank me now, I love attention, crave praise."

"Thanks." Bucky kept staring at Tony.

"You have the most beautiful eyes, Rambo. Seriously, people say it's Steve, but between you and me, I like yours better."

Bucky stood. "I like your workshop."

Tony was pleased that he didn't call it a lab. "Really?"

"Truly." Bucky meant it. "Your dad was an incredible optimist, but he was a terrible mechanic. I fixed his flying car and designed Steve's shield. Don't tell him that, there's a reason he doesn't know."

Tony blinked. Bucky didn't speak as fast as Tony did, but somehow he was able to fit more information into his sentences. Tony took note of the pacing for future use. "Well, you know..me and pops. Dad. Daddy dearest." He stalled, searched, and came up with nothing. Bucky inspected a blue print in the meantime.

"You know, we ain't our fathers. Sometimes, you gotta scrap the whole thing and start over. His machines were cool, but between you and me," Bucky borrowed Tony's words. "I like yours better."

"You're just saying that." Tony deflected.

"I ain't a liar. S'okay if you don't believe me now, though. Give it a little time. I'm telling you pal, this is some seriously cool shit." Bucky put his finger down over the design for the arc reactor. "Seriously cool."

Sam couldn't understand it. He turned it over in his head a million times and couldn't figure out why Bucky was so strangely gentle with Tony. It was almost paternal. Protective. Tony didn't know how to act. He acted a fool, is how he acted. Sam knew Howard wasn't exactly the best father in the world, but still. Tony preened under Bucky's carefulness, brought him little robots and blue prints like a child vying for prime real estate on the refrigerator.

"Brother, what the hell is up with Tony and your boyfriend?" Sam asked.

"He's not my boyfriend."

"Whatever. Tony's so much all the time, how've they not choked each other out? You and Tony love to fight."

Steve laughed at Sam like it was the most obvious thing in the world. For the record, Sam did not like it when Steve knew things he didn't. "Bucky's the biggest nerd around, and he was an older brother to another, smaller nerd. I'm an only child and I failed three years of science." He said, as if this explained everything. It did and it didn't. Sam kept turning it over in his mind.

_I have a lot to atone for, and that's an understatement. Maybe I can start by filling in where I'm needed. That's the only thing I was ever really good at anyway. I was needed to protect you, and then needed for the war, and then needed to protect you again. Now, you're big and world wise and you have other friends and you don't really need me. Tony doesn't exactly need me, but he does need an anchor before he drifts himself away. Holy hell, he's got a lotta anxiety, huh? Sometimes, I almost get why you want to sock him in the jaw most days. It would knock him out for a few minutes, at least. It might be good for his health._   
  


Gabe survived the war and left a letter in his will for each of the Howling Commandos, Bucky included. Bucky reads his now. The first sentence: I would have loved you for free. He puts the letter down and rests his head on the cool surface of the table before he continues. It is not a long letter, and it is not a self conscious one.

_I would have loved you for free. I think I sort of know the way you are, because there's something quiet and cagey about you that Steve doesn't have. Well, me, too. And here's the thing, I did love you for free, for nothing at all. I know you are long dead now, but I can't just write these letters without writing one to you. I hope that in some far-off year, there's a place for people like us. That they won't give us medals for killing a thousand men one day and a dishonorable discharge for loving one the next. I am selfish, I know this much is true. I looked at you and all your shadows when it was so clear you loved someone else and didn't know how. I married a woman I could never love that way because I just needed to have a_ _family. So, selfishly, I will pretend you are alive as I write this, so I can tell you what I never got to say: you've got to let yourself be loved, in whatever way it comes to you, at some point. I don't know your life story, but you are so adverse to trust it's unreal. Not everybody that reaches out a hand is going to hit you. Sometimes they just want to hold your hand. I hope you're resting now_.  
  


Fine. Bucky carefully folds the letter and puts it away. Fine.

Steve is fooling around with something in the kitchen, Natasha poses ridiculously on a stool. "No, no, no," Sam, next to Steve, shakes his head. "You're getting the eyes wrong!" Bucky sees the flour spread across the counter, their white fingers. Patterns in the grain resembling a woman's face. Steve makes a face.

"I'm not," He insists. "That's what you're doing!"

_What if your god puts me in hell for the way I am? What, then, Steve? What, then?_

There is nothing special about the day. It's two pm. Bucky calls Steve, who is looking at a pile of paper work like it's going to bite him. "Hey!" His voice is a little too relived.

"I'm queer." Bucky says, simply. Silence on the other end. He listens to Steve's slow breathing and pretends he didn't say anything after all. What the hell was he thinking?

"Will you do something for me?" Steve finally asks. Bucky swallows the lump in his throat. So many years of torture, but this is the worst of all. He braces himself for the words: move out, leave, don't ever speak to me again. Instead, he says, "Sure," his voice careful and controlled.

"Do you remember what the sketchbook you gave me in...I think it was '37...looks like?"

This, Bucky can live with. So Steve will ignore it, because Bucky is unstable. He isn't anymore, but he could be, and he could let Steve think that if that's what it takes. Just scrap the whole thing and start over. "No," Bucky answers honestly. "But if you tell me where it is I can find it." Steve has a photographic memory. It used to annoy the both of them.

Steve, younger, smaller: I don't understand why you can't just fuckin remember at least the floor of ma's wing-

Bucky, younger, gaunter: don't you goddamn lie to me, what the hell did he look like? Tell me what this fucker looked like before he smashed your face in or I swear to god-  
  


Now, Bucky listens comfortably to the easy way Steve describes the shelf in his room and all of the sketchbooks laid out just the way Bucky is seeing them. "Third from the left," Steve says. Bucky takes it out.

"Leather cover, chunk missing from the top right corner?" Bucky asks.

"That's the one. So here's what I need you to do, just look through it. Paw through it like I hate you doing. Smudge it and mess it up, I don't care. We can talk if you want when I get back tonight, but I have some paper work I have to get through now." Steve hangs up before Bucky can acknowledge him. He stares at the stack of paperwork. He imagines Bucky crumpling pages and smudging lines and flipping through the sketchbook. It isn't his fault, he's as careful as he knows to be, even though it always pisses Steve off a little bit.

Bucky puts his back against Steve's bed and opens the cover. His handwriting says something about a merry Christmas punk from 1937. The first page is Steve's Ma. Then some sketches of Bucky's sisters. A few skylines. And then Bucky's hands. Pages and pages and pages of Bucky's hands and his shoulders. Desperately, deliberately, like Steve from so long ago is trying to tell him something. Bucky doesn't understand it. He has to go through some more sketchbooks to understand. At least, that's what he tells himself. Really, he's an addict getting a fix. How long has it been since he's indulged in going through Steve's art? Too long. It fascinates him, enthralls him, makes him lose track of time.

And then, here's Steve home from work and Bucky with all of the sketchbooks containing him in various iterations all across the floor. "I said the one from '37."

Bucky blinks up at him innocently. "You didn't say not any of the others."

Steve throws up his hands. Jesus Christ. "Why? Why? What is it about my shit that makes you rifle all through it? Don't tell me the war, you did this before!"

"I need it. I can't need you, so I need this." It feels good to finally say it. Bucky watches Steve swallow above him. The clench of his jaw. He's going to hell, but at least he'll indulge himself one last time.

"You can need me." Steve says finally. He sits down and crosses his legs. Bucky is surprised to find no anger in the furrow of his eyebrows. He's surprised to find no furrow at all. For the first time ever, he can't tell what Steve is thinking. Steve reaches over and grabs a sketchbook, his tie brushing Bucky's leg. "You can need me." Steve runs his hand over a pencil drawing inside and looks at his palm. It comes away silvery. "That don't ask, don't tell stuff... that's not the way it is anymore. It's not like that anymore. It's not illegal."

All Bucky can do is shake his head. He needs a haircut again, his hair is curling and cow licking at the nape of his neck, around his ears. "I'm not gonna put you in that position."

Steve sniffs a laugh. "You're so damn difficult to love, James Barnes. And I dunno if it's 'cause you don't love yourself, or you think you don't deserve love. Or maybe it's just me. Maybe I don't know how to love you in a way you understand."

Bucky holds very, very still.

Steve begins again. "I shouldn't have said you're difficult to love. You're actually not. It's the easiest thing in the world to love you. What's hard is figuring out what to do with it. You want it? I'll give it to you, easy. But if you don't, I'll hang on to it, and if you never want that kinda love from me then...then...then that's alright, too." He forces himself to say, hating the stillness of Bucky, the way he refuses to answer.

"I didn't go to war because I loved you." Bucky says finally. "And I didn't shoot that scientist because I loved you, either. But." He stops. He starts again. Always starting again. "I went to war, anyway. I shot that guy, anyway. I loved you, anyway. I kept thinking maybe...maybe someday I would stop. But Steve, loving you is the easiest thing in the world to me just the same as it's the hardest. It's like living. Like staying alive."

In his letter to Steve, Gabe wrote:

_To the Man of Myths and the Myth if a Man,_

_Steve Rogers, it's been a pleasure to know you. It's been even more of a pleasure to know Bucky when he's around you. I can almost understand how he'd break half the hearts of New York. Clearly, though, now more than ever with the gift of hindsight, I see that the heart he broke the most was his own. Maybe he's gone, but I seem to see him all the time now. He's in a carefree laugh and I swear to god I just watched this war movie and the way the light flashed into a man's eyes- that was him. It was me and Morita stuck in a trench, disoriented and dug in, not knowing which way to go and then a flash through the dirt and smoke. Bucky compromising_ _his position and flashing the light off his scope to show us which way to run. And maybe you see him in other places, because you knew him before the war broke him into something harder. Who am I to say? Here's what I will say: he was difficult and I'd bet money he was just as difficult before I knew him. I think he had been shown love wrong at some point and didn't understand how to accept it the way you and I tried to give it to him. Maybe if somebody had held his hand once in a while. Who knows....._

The musings of a dying man, old. Steve easily threads his fingers together with Bucky's. A man who'd died, young. Bucky looks at the hands of the man he used to dream about learning. He looks back at Steve, right into his eyes. Blue blue blue and then there it is- the flick of green. Gone when he blinks sandy eyelashes against faded freckles. Bucky wonders, inanely, if the press team covers up Steve's freckles, because he's never seen them on television or even on the original Captain America press tour posters. "The thing is, Steve, you are you, and I am me." Bucky says gently, like he's not breaking his own heart on purpose. "And your church has had me burning since the '30's."

Steve laughs. He truly laughs. He's too close and Bucky wants to flinch at the sudden too-loud noise, but he doesn't. He lets it grate against his brain, like maybe somehow it'll stay there forever. "Oh, maybe some of the churches I sit in, go to regularly. Maybe. But not My Church and not My God. We have an understanding, you see. It begins with me doing whatever the hell I want as long as I'm not leaving the world a worse place for it, and ends somewhere in your eyes."

_Till the end of the line, pal. You're shit at math, so let me refresh your memory: lines don't fuckin end. But that's not really the meaning, and you're shit at metaphors, too, so I'll just tell you: you're my line. You're where I draw the line. You're where I end and I begin. So I'm with you so long as I end with you, and if I'm not your line and you end with somebody else, so be it._

Steve and Bucky do not follow the rules laid out by the press team. They dance around each other like the ebb and flow of the same tide in different waves, a rhythm only they seem to know. Steve doesn't say 'I love you'. He holds Bucky's hand instead, and it means much more. Bucky fills as many journals as Steve does sketchbooks. Bucky goes through Steve's sketchbooks methodically, religiously. Steve doesn't touch Bucky's journals out of principal.

They scrap the whole system and start over. Keep the good and kick out the bad. Steve goes to church and Bucky sometimes thinks in Yiddish and says what he means in Russian. Neither of them burn. Yet. And if they do, well. Scrap the whole thing. Begin again.


End file.
